What is Wrong with this Kitchen?

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Have you ever walked into a room and thought something was off? Sometimes it is hard to put your finger on it. Other times it is a big elephant in the room. Or wasted space with no purpose. Perhaps you have to live with something before realizing there might just be a better way. Even if you don’t have Spidey senses, the following fun challenge is for you!

Pop-quiz time!

Take a look at the following two pictures and see if you notice anything wrong with this kitchen.  Please pause and look at each picture before continuing to read the text.  You can click on the pictures to get a larger version in another tab.  Once you see the answers you can hover over both the question and answer pictures to see if the dialogue in your head is the same as my answer key.  😉

Picture #1:

Answer:

WHY IS THE RANGE RIGHT BY THE DOOR?!?

The carport is just through this door making it convenient to come in with all your groceries. But right as you come into the house the freestanding range is immediately to right! This is one house where you can’t come in and throw your keys on the counter. Instead you have to make sure you don’t come in swinging and catch your grocery shopping bag on the handle of a pot of boiling water. (My husband can tell you what that does to your foot and how extremely nice everyone is at the Maricopa Burn Center in downtown Phoenix. His incident was in no way related to this house because it is unfortunately two states away.)

In my head, a second scenario involves me opening the oven door to take out a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies. My daughter and some of her friends come barreling through the door making the turn to get some water and running into the hot oven door as I am screaming for them to stop.

There is one more smaller item to note.  Did you notice the cabinet next to the oven is not attached the the adjacent cabinet?  Perhaps I should just swap the location of the oven and the cabinet next to it. Dang.  I should have thought of that 9 years ago before I remodeled the entire kitchen.

Picture #2:

Answer:

WHAT IS WITH THE BISQUE COLORED ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM AND WASTED SPACE IN THE CORNER?!?!

There is a window to the left of the other side of the L-shaped kitchen. The refrigerator awkwardly stands 90 degrees just off of the cabinet run, leaving a void.  Even this imaginative lady cannot easily determine how it can be used effectively. This is an 13’ x 15’ eat-in kitchen. The house is only 1100 square feet. The void is 16 ft² of wasted space in one of the most important rooms of the house.

Original Kitchen Footprint

When you think another moment, the refrigerator is also eating into a huge chunk of where a table should go. Maybe a table will not be against the wall, but then there should be enough space for a chair to back out from a table. If you swing the refrigerator around in front of the window you are using the original 16 feet of wasted space. In addition, this frees up the 6.48 ft² of space for the footprint of a 29-⅞” x 31-¾” refrigerator (this includes the handles on my current refrigerator). In all reality, the current setup is wasting 22.48 ft²of space!

But wait!?! What if we wanted *to open* the refrigerator door? The full swing is an additional 6.20 ft² including room for you to luxuriously stand in front of the door as you swing it open. I’m counting this because in the current configuration the door opening does not fall in a normal walkway.  Therefore, it also eats into the ideal position of a table or chair. At this point, our back of the napkin/fancy graph paper calculation is up to 28.68 square feet of wasted space.

The kitchen is 195 ft². 28.68 ft² out of 195 ft² means 14.71% of the kitchen is not used properly!

WARNING: Real Nerd Alert!

If we want to get really nerdy, let’s calculate the space already dedicated to another use. The cabinets and oven take up an additional 35 ft². If we would like to have a 2’ walkway in front of the cabinets we account for another 28 ft². It would also be nice to have at least a 2’ path to get from the exterior door to the doorway to the rest of the house (roughly 34 ft²). At this point we have identified three non-negotiable parts of the room taking up 97 square feet of our original 195. HALF OF THE KITCHEN IS ALREADY IN USE!

Our previous calculation of 28.68 ft² for the awkward refrigerator placement against the remaining 98 ft² of supposed free space comes out to 29.27%.  In other words, 98 ft² of the kitchen space SHOULD BE dedicated only to comfortably sit, converse and eat.  Instead, almost 30% of the remaining space is wasted!

This setup had to go! Getting the refrigerator into one of the two walls with cabinets to free up space was a top priority.  Now there are multiple locations to put a kitchen table. Eliminating the bisque elephant in the middle of the room makes the kitchen look larger.  It also makes the house look like it is designed to have a refrigerator rather than expecting a daily to run to the store to get milk.

Extra Credit:

Picture #1 is also has some subtle clues to another hidden missed opportunity.  Notice the cabinet door on the bottom is about 24 inches wide.  The featured image at the top of this post shows a small set of drawers just to the right of the sink. Picture #2 shows there is a 36 inch cabinet below the sink.  Putting those two clues together we have discovered an inaccessible 4 ft² of wasted space.  This is why they make Lazy Susan base cabinets and why we installed one in this exact location during the remodel.

You may have also noticed there is no dishwasher. A microwave would be nice too, but it would be even nicer if it did not take up half the counter top space. The cabinets look like someone expanded the storage of the original kitchen, but the counter top does not extend continuously over them leaving gaps in the surface. It certainly looks like some of the cabinet doors could use a little extra love.*

So we decided to give this kitchen a lot of extra love and get it into 2008.

Did you pass the pop quiz?

*These are all first world problems since the kitchen plumbing still worked well and electricity allows you to see even when the sun goes down.  The plumbing was updated from galvanized steel to one of the original PEX products.  So someone had given it some initial love too.